night dance

THE NIGHT DANCESynopsis: Rowena, the youngest of twelve sisters, loves to slip out of the castle at night. Soon she convinces her sisters to join her. When Sir Ethan notices that his daughters' slippers look tattered he posts a challenge. The first man to discover where his daughters have been is free to marry the one he chooses. Our hero, a knight of King Arthur's Roundtable, takes the challenge but learns so much more than he set out to find. These sister are up to some extremely strange magic!.

WHY I WROTE THIS STORY THE WAY I DID...

This is the first novel I wrote for Simon & Schuster's ONCE UPON A TIME series of novels that retold classic fairy tales in new and unusual ways. I chose the story of The Twelve Dancing Princesses because it had always intrigued me. It was so mysterious! For one thing, it's not a tale by the Grimm Brothers but a much older story. There are several versions of it, too.

One of the issues I had with the original fairy tale was how the hero has to find out where the sisters are going at night and reveal this to their father. In reward, he gets to pick which of the sisters he chose to marry. To my modern mind, only a creep of a guy would rat a girl out and then force her to marry him. That seemed more like a villain than a hero to me. So I changed it! (One of the great things about being an author is that you can change whatever you like.)

As much as I loved fairytales as a girl, I also devoured the legends of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. (I also loved Greek mythology, but that's for another discussion.) I went to the Arthurian legends to find a better hero and also to find a back story to how these 12 girls came to be locked up in a castle by their supposedly loving father. (Fathers tend to be protective but this was taking it too far.) It turned out to be a rich resource. In Camelot, I found a hero I developed a crush on--the strong and loyal Sir Bedivere who was self-conscious about his wounded hand. And I found a good candidate to play the missing mother--the mysterious Lady of the Lake, who didn't leave her girls willingly but because she was trapped below the lake by the evil sorceress Morgan LeFay. In my version, the hero is no longer a craven opportunist, but a noble knight on a mission to return the sword of King Arthur, Excalibur, to the Lady of the Lake, thereby freeing her. Upon glimpsing Rowena, he falls madly in love and out in the woods one day, they have a magical melding of the minds that leads to a lifelong love for both of them.

There's much more than even that to the story, but I don't want to be a spoiler. I just wanted to tell you how adding the Arthurian elements to the original tale made the whole writing experience so much richer for me. And I leave you with this thought--

Excerpt:Rowena pressed her slim body into the cool shadowy corner of the high wall in the empty courtyard. Shaded by the towering building behind her, her wavy copper-colored hair seemed to take on a more auburn hue. A determined glint deepened her lively, celery-colored eyes into a stormy blue-green.

Furtively glancing back at the towering manor that was her home, she saw one of her eleven sisters, Eleanore, peer out from a high, narrow window. Even from this distance she could read the look of longing in her sister's expression. Prickly though Eleanore could be, Rowena still sympathized with the trapped restlessness she knew her sister felt. Still, she couldn't take the chance of being seen, and she shrank back farther into the shadows.

When Rowena turned her attention back to the upper window, Eleanore was no longer there. In the next minute, Helen reappeared at the kitchen window, but only for a second, to pull the shutters closed.Rowena waited, barely breathing, for several minutes more. Soon she felt confident that things were finally as she had hoped they'd be at this hour. Her sisters would be busy with their weaving and embroidery. Their father, Sir Ethan of Colchester, was reviewing his monthly accounts, a process that usually took hours. Most likely he wouldn't lift his head from his books until Mary, the head housemaid, summoned him for dinner...Rowena turned again toward the wall. With eager fingers, she traced the lines of a crack that traveled from the top of the break in the wall halfway up to the top. Several fissures snaked out from the main fracture, further weakening this section of the enclosure.

The day before, when Mary had ordered two of the house boys to remove a brown, dead, potted tree--one of the many potted plants adorning the slate-tiled courtyard--from this corner of the courtyard, Rowena had first noticed the break in the wall. She instantly recognized the opportunity she'd been hoping for.

With the cleaver in her firm grip, she attempted several slow practice passes to be sure that when the moment was right, her aim would be accurate. Then, wrapping her fingers around the cleaver's iron handle, she waited, her back pressed against the wall.

In the next moment, the bell from the monastery outside the nearby town of Glastonbury chimed as it always did at this hour, calling the monks to prayer.

Now! Rowena thought wildly. She smashed the cleaver's blade down into the line of the crack, the deeply satisfying crash masked by the resonating bell.

The cleaver stuck fast into the wall. With two hands, she frantically yanked it out and struck again.

And now!And now!

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